Archive for August, 2013

A pair of high-profile titles — “Prisoners” and “12 Years a Slave” — have been added to the Telluride Film Festival lineup as “sneak” screenings. The dramas — both which are heading to the Toronto Intl. Film Festival next week — will screen Friday evening. Neither was on the lineup of 45 feature films announced... Read more

Digital marketing, which reaches customers interactively through web, mobile and social media, is in rapid ascendance. But not all companies – and, more importantly, their marketing departments – have embraced the creative opportunities that social media offer.
While some brands are receiving awards and being celebrated for their innovative digital campaigns, others within the same industries have yet to launch their first digital campaign. So why is adoption across the industry uneven?
"Digital is potentially the most perfect form of marketing, but also one of the most difficult," said a participant at a recent expert discussion on digital marketing maturity. The event

Earlier this month, Nicholas Carr put out a great piece on the massive slowdown in e-book sales growth. In it, he mused on the reasons why the category “may fall short of expectations”, especially as substitute to hardcopy books.
It was thus with great interest that an AdAge piece published on Monday caught my eye. Reporting on data from the Alliance for Audited Media, the outlet discussed that digital magazine subscriptions, too, are far from meeting expectations. I love magazines. I read and subscribe to them religiously. Yet, while I never read print newspaper, I primarily read magazines in hardcopy. There’s

Foursquare is rolling out a new suggestion feature that will use location information to push nearby recommendations to users. (It's currently in limited release to select Android users.) The company says it will factor more than four billion check-ins and 32 million tips into the new push notifications, which should help resolve prior issues with location accuracy.
The application will send users a notification whenever they're near a location that has recommendations—for instance, by alerting them to a restaurant's best dish. According to the company, the new feature won't cause significant battery drain; running the application in the background throughout the

Subtract the kidnapping, and “Labor Day” depicts the most romantic long weekend a divorced hausfrau could hope for, as a swarthy stranger waltzes into her life, passing the time by fixing the car, making pie and teaching her awkward son to play baseball.

Digg, the Betaworks-owned social content portal, has come to Android . The app is simple, and not unlike the website; users can browse through the list of top linked stories posted to the home page, curated by Digg’s small team. Users can also save stories and send them to the Instapaper or Pocket apps (basically “read it later” functions), as well as log into and peruse Digg Reader, the outfit’s recently released answer to the death of Google Reader . Under old management, Digg was once dominant as a content collection player of the social Web, but it faltered in recent years, losing ground to the likes of other social aggregation hubs (Facebook, Twitter and Buzzfeed, for instance). But since Betaworks bought Digg’s assets last year , the site has seen something of a resurgence, both in growth and in delivering traffic to external sites. Digg considers Thursday’s Android release a first step into the new OS, and plans to continue updating the app with added features regularly in the future.

Thomas Tull may have found his next creature feature. The producer of monster movies like “Godzilla” and “Pacific Rim” is wasting no time in choosing which films he wants to make at Universal Pictures, with “Dracula” poised to become the first high-profile project his Legendary Entertainment will co-finance with the studio. The film, directed by... Read more

Adding five Thursday Night Football games to its lineup has paid handsome dividends for NFL Network, enabling the league’s in-house TV outlet to boost its carriage fees by as much as 41 percent. According to SNL Kagan estimates, NFL Network in 2013 charges operators an average affiliate fee of $1.34 per subscriber per month, a sharp increase from the $0.95 a pop the channel commanded a year ago. The new pricing scheme now places NFL Net second among all cable properties, surpassing TNT ($1.29) and the non-ad supported Disney Channel ($0.99). At the top of the carriage fee food chain is ESPN, which rakes in a princely fee of $5.45 per sub per month, up from $5.01 in 2012. Given NFL Network’s recent subscriber gains (the channel now reaches 69.7 million homes, up 10 percent from the year-ago 63.2 million), overall affiliate revenue is expected to increase 56 percent to $1.12 billion. The 2012 campaign marked the first in which NFL Net carried nearly a full season’s worth of live games. Over the course of 13 telecasts, the network averaged 6.35 million viewers and a 2.6 rating in the adults 18-49 demo. While NFL Network seems to get fed the league’s table scraps (last year’s games included a lopsided 31-13 scrum between the 1-7 Kansas City Chiefs and the 4-4 San Diego Chargers), a handful of early games scared up big numbers. The first TNF game of 2012, an NFC North grudge match between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers, delivered 8.56 million viewers and a 3.8 in the dollar demo, while the Browns and Ravens battled on Sept. 27 in front of a national TV audience of 8.05 million viewers. A late defensive stand by Baltimore secured a win over division rival Cleveland; per Nielsen, the game averaged a 3.3 among the 18-49 set. The live-plus-same-day ratings do not take into account local deliveries in each team’s home market. Naturally, the beefed up NFL slate helped boost the network’s fourth-quarter ratings. NFL Net averaged 751,000 total viewers in Q4 prime, up 12 percent versus the prior-year 668,000. The dollar demo was up 13 percent to 378,000 adults 18-49.

“Rupert,” a stage play about the life of News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, opened Thursday in Australia. The Melbourne Theatre Company production, written by prominent Aussie playwright David Williamson, portrays some of the most pivotal moments in the media mogul’s life. Events dramatized include his 1969 purchase of the since-shut down newspaper News of the... Read more

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Talk NYC/WW is your daily download of the tech, marketing and advertising news you need to know. It’s smartly curated to keep you up to speed on the innovators and innovations that are shaking up the digital world today.